Mereghetti’s report card Cinema, the space of dreams Olivia Colman, face of an Oscar (score 6/7)- Corriere.it

A tribute to cinema. Or rather: a tribute to the memory of the cinema, when the boxes of films piled up in front of the projectionist’s door and the masks welcomed you with a smile to cancel your ticket. It’s the cinema he grew up with Sam Mendes (Oscars for “American Beauty”two Bonds including the unmissable «Skyfall» and then «1917»
nominations for directing as well as in nine other categories), the cinema that marked his adolescence and his imagination and that during the pandemic it has become such a strong and obsessive theme that it has become a film, «
Empire of Light»
(ipse dixit).

A cinema that looked like a castletowering over the waterfront of a Kentish town (it’s Margate) but starting to show the signs of wear and above all the arrival of new times: once it had four screens, now only two are left on while the new prime minister Thatcher (we are in 1981) seems to do everything to make things worse social tensions. So the “castellana” Hilary (Olivia Colman, unjustly forgotten at the nominations for the Oscars) just has to use the abandoned rooms to find some peace and carve out a space to dream.

To tell the truth, Hilary is not quite the chatelaine of Empire cinemait’s just a kind of secretary who also coordinates the staff and who has to accept one relation what we would say today toxic with the “lord” of the place, the owner Donald Ellis (Colin Firth), totally insensitive to fragility of a woman who came out marked by depression. And that you try to find the strength to carry on right in your relationship with other employees, until the young Stephen (Michael Ward), a black boy who dreams of university and who turns on Hilary the hope of a relationship not suffered but desired.

Sam Mendes, who signed the film scriptuse the Empire as the canvas on which to move their characters and together shape their own love for cinema. Sometimes it is the bastion that defends against the aggressiveness of the outside world (the racist demonstrators invading the streets to be kept away or the insulting bystander to be turned away), other times it is a labyrinth to hide in (as Hilary and Stephen do when they discover their mutual attraction), other times just the backdrop where each of the employees plays their own small part, under the sympathetic and melancholic gaze of the old projectionist (Toby Jones), to whom life seems to have taught above all resignation and patience

Sometimes we spectators let’s peek into the hall and we “steal” some film clips to remember what times we lived in, sometimes with an antiphrastic function (“No one can stop us” where Sidney Poitier directs Gene Wilder and Richard Prior in a farce that makes fun of racist stereotypes just as racism is making a comeback in Great Britain and Stephen is paying the consequences), sometimes to reiterate the imminent sunset («Beyond the garden»latest film by Peter Sellers, perfect complement to even physical decay of the Empire), other times to frame the failing dream of a possible rebirth, as in the gala evening for the premiere of “Moments of glory”which will also mark the unveiling of human misery by Donald Ellis.

Over everything, however, hangs like a fog that never wants to lift and that neither the light which films are made of manages to illuminate because it ends up making the dust of the Empire shine but also the tiredness of living that slowly grips Hilary and that makes her slide towards a self-punishing act of rebellion. Ending up shutting down, or at least for weaken much, that light which, according to the title, should still make cinema shine. And what at first it seemed a hymn to the strength of films and their lore it proves to be sort of disenchantedepidice for a world definitely gone down. Ending up revealing the fragility of a director who seems more at ease with the big Hollywood production machines than with shadows of a sad past.